Re: st: renaming a variable from the contents of its observation

[David Kantor <dkantor@jhu.edu>]

At 02:36 PM 7/1/2004 +0100,  Dev Vencappa wrote:
> Dear all
>  I have a large data set containing variables v9 to v200.
>
> variable names:  v9   v10     v11   v12    v13     v14 ........ ..... v200
>   Observation 1  TAN  TAN   TAL  TAN  CAN    TLM
>   Observation 2  4108 4103  4108  5214  1235     1108
>
> Each of these numbers in the second row of observations represents a 
> particular variable code. What I want is to prefix each of these numbers 
> with the text in the first row of observation e.g. TAN4108 TAN4103 CAN1235 
> TLM1108, etc. After that, I want to rename my existing variables 
> (v9,v10,v11,...-v126) to these newly created variables.
Presumably these variables are all of string type -- as seen by the 
contents of the first observation.  Thus, even though there are values 
4108, 4103, etc. in the 2nd observation, they are really string 
values.  Then you can do this (untested):

forvalues k = 1/200  /* or whatever the maximum is */ {
 local newname  = v`k'[1] + v`k'[2]
 ren v`k'  `newname'
}

I hope this helps.
-- David


David Kantor
Institute for Policy Studies
Johns Hopkins University
dkantor@jhu.edu
410-516-5404

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/